A friend of mine got a brand new laptop in the mail yesterday. Two weeks before, to the day, her old beloved laptop bit the dust. Hermes was its name, I think.
My laptop hasn’t got a name. In fact, until tworivers’ laptop died and its name was revealed, the thought of naming a laptop had not occurred to me. The very fact that she named her laptop implies an attachment of Extraordinary Importance.
She spends a lot of time with her laptop, and I am the delighted recipient of some of her attention to it. Happily, when the laptop died, she directed her attention to the desktop computer, and so All was not lost.
It was a difficult two weeks for her, though. A desktop is not a laptop, as anyone with a laptop will tell you. There was measurable anxiety about when the laptop would arrive, and there were delays, and considerations of ordering Something Else, and the actual ordering of Something Else, and a deadline of when the laptop Absolutely Had To Arrive. Meanwhile, “Everywhere I go,” she mourned aloud, “it seems I see people with laptops everywhere. And most of them are IBMs” (which is what hers was, you see). Even in my own living room, I must admit, dear tworivers was exposed to an IBM laptop that did not belong to her. This did not gall her; she did not covet my laptop. It’s just that she was painfully aware of being without one, and there mine was, and…. Well. You see what I mean.
But yesterday it arrived. It is bigger, she says, and quieter than Hermes. And presumably faster, and really better than the old one if only in that it is Not Dead. I am so happy for her. Because now she can work on VBS stuff on her laptop, and become familiar with a machine that isn’t so unlike the one she had before, and she can take it with her when she goes to Washington in a few weeks, so that I will not be Bereft in her absence.
Meanwhile I must say that I feel her pain. My laptop is working just fine; that is not what I mean. But everywhere I look– and I mean Everywhere I Look– I see people walking around, on Two Feet.
